I ditched corporate America in 1994 and started a management consulting and venture capital firm (http://petercohan.com). I started following stocks in 1981 when I was in grad school at MIT and started analyzing tech stocks as a guest on CNBC in 1998. I became a Forbes contributor in April 2011. My 11th book is "Hungry Start-up Strategy: Creating New Ventures with Limited Resources and Unlimited Vision" (http://goo.gl/ygaUV). I also teach business strategy and entrepreneurship at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass.

What is Occupy Wall Street?

People are gathering in streets around the world under the banner Occupy Wall Street (OWS). I have been watching with some curiosity — struggling to figure out what OWS wants. If the Occupied Wall Street Journalis a good source, the answer is contained in this simple sentence: “Rebellion will not stop until the corporate state is extinguished.”

This statement raises more questions than it answers though. Such as:

What does OWS mean by rebellion? For example, does rebellion mean living in the city streets carrying signs? Will the students who have joined the street dwellers rebel by dropping out of school or will they go back? Will the unions that have supported OWS keep working in their jobs?

What does OWS mean by corporate state? I’d infer from The Occupy Wall Street Journal that it means what OWS perceives to be the use of corporate money to create government policies that “abuse” poor, elderly, sick and young people; pollute the environment; “force” people to go into debt to pay medical bills and get an education; kill people in “imperial” wars; and repossess or foreclose on their houses. This definition makes me wonder: Does OWS see any societal benefit in the jobs that companies create, the products they produce and deliver, the taxes they pay? Why does OWS see trying to shut down terrorist networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan as imperial?

What does OWS mean by extinguish? On the face of it, the answer looks simple — destroy all corporations and their influence over government policy. What is OWS’s proposed approach to producing all the products that people use in their daily lives once corporations have been “extinguished”? Does OWS have ideas about how people will get paid for work after companies go away?

In the wake of the Tea Party, I think it’s democratic for a movement of people to gather in the streets on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Unlike the Koch Industries-backed Tea Party; however, OWS will need to find non-corporate sources to sustain itself until it extinguishes the corporate state.

Meanwhile, I have a thought on OWS’s desire to end the corporate state: mend it, don’t end it. Corporations provide many benefits to society — they use people, capital, and technology to create value for consumers, employees, shareholders, and communities. Through competition, companies strive to gain market share by giving consumers good products at an ever-lower price or great products at a higher price.

And in so doing, companies create jobs that provide money, health care, and a sense of purpose. If companies can do all this while earning better than expected profits, they reward shareholders. And by paying taxes and giving to communities, they are decent citizens.

Regrettably, not all companies follow this value-creating script. That’s why society needs to regulate companies. And due to the symbiosis between politicians who need cash to finance their quest for power and companies that are eager to supply that cash in exchange for profit-boosting government policies, government does not represent the interests of non-corporate people as well as it does those of corporate ones.

This is where we need to mend what OWS calls the corporate state. That’s because as long as they use money to pay lobbyists, make campaign contributions, and dangle the lure of higher paying private sector jobs in front of those in government tasked with regulating business, society runs the risk that corporations will engage in some questionable conduct.

For example, I doubt that fracking – the practice of blowing up rock to release natural gas — would be permitted near residential areas if energy companies did not make hefty campaign contributions. Furthermore, without supplying funds to Washington — such as Ameriquest’s $7.8 million in 2004 campaign contributions to George W. Bush’s re-election campaign — I question whether sub-prime mortgage lenders would have been permitted to sign up borrowers who couldn’t repay.

To limit corporate malefaction, we must limit the reach of corporate cash. If OWS inadvertently achieves that aim, society will continue to enjoy the benefits of the corporate state with fewer of its costs.

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The point is exactly what they say. To get rid of corporations who are buying government policy, getting bailed out when they are too weak to survive alone and are given tax breaks that should be given to the 99% instead. Regular people cannot pay to have their voice heard any louder; they vote. We cannot be bailed out when we lose all our money; we live on the street. We pay our taxes; we are American.

Our vote doesn’t count in Illinois. It doesn’t matter if the whole state votes for someone, if the unions of Chicago/Cook County/Sangamon County (where Springfield is) want someone elected – that’s who wins.

While many have legitimately asked “what does OWS actually want?”, I believe your assessment is correct. They simply want the US government to care more about the individual citizens (i.e. We the People) more than the powerful corporations. I don’t think a rational observer would legitimately want to eliminate all corporations, just swing the balance of power back to the citizens. In my opinion, two simple structural changes can accomplish this: congressional term limits and major campaign finance reform, preferably where candidates can only accept donations from registered voters in their district or state.

If you ask what the corporations and government want from us specifically, the answer is: buy more stuff quickly to stimulate the economy!

If you ask what they want generally, the answer is: Leave policy to us!

Unlike the corporations and the govt. who have had a long time to work out the ideas described above, OWS has just been born. If your not satisfied with “The 99% got sold out and the 1% got bailed out”, be patient.

How about manufactured financial crisis, holding main street hostage in exchange for bail outs?

Corporations that received bail out money return to profitability amazingly fast after busting up unions? Did they need money or did they just need a crisis to bust up the unions? Ask the workers how happy they are about who got which end of the stick in the crisis. Their union reps are barely keeping the rage at bay…

What about those corporate citizens that do nothing but funnel money to politicians? I guess they do that out of the kindness of their heart…

The Corporations that you outlined in your article do serve a purpose for the betterment of society the benefits they provide to society outweigh the detriment, it is the ones that go so far in the opposite directions of what an ideal corporate steward should be, that need to be corrected.

If you want to send jobs overseas where workers can be abused fine, follow them over there. If you want to pollute here, like you can in other countries then go there.

We don’t need your jobs that bad that we would suffer abuse, horrific working and living conditions, shortened life spans and toxic environments. For all the talk lately about how many jobs the EPA kills you have to ask how many lives does it save? How many people stay working on the job and not stuck in a hospital draining not only their “benefits” but those of others?

If corporations want to be treated as regular citizens then we need a way to separate the bad from the good and there isn’t anyone or anything that does that, they all fly under the same banner and its like having a town without a sheriff or worse a sheriff that is on the take…

This is my first time posting on this site. I try to keep an open mind, I read the NYT, Alternet,Bloomberg. Mr. Cohan’s article seems a bit ingenuous seeing that there definitely is a clear consensus of what the major ideas those people who are demonstrating agree on. Perhaps like others who claim not to “get it” he is more interested in trivializing recent events than doing a comprehensive analysis. On the other hand the response by many of the readers who are posting are insightful and wonderfully written. I thank them for their clarity. Obviously one visits The Capitalist Tool with certain expectations. The reality was quite different. I leave feeling illuminated.

What unions got busted up due to a corporate bailout? I seem to remember the UAW being given a bunch of free stock when GM took the government handout. Many smaller corporations that were owed money by GM went bankrupt because the Obama administration decided to reward the union for their support rather than let the bankruptcy laws determine how the company would be split up. I guess you aren’t concerned about the workers at the companies that were forced into bankruptcy when the White House decided the unions should be winners and those who were actually owed money would be the losers. The only reason any union rep is upset is because the feds didn’t give them the whole company.

You make a lot of unsubstantiated claims with no proof given. Typical of a liberal; who needs proof when you have already made up your mind. Too bad the facts don’t support any of your delusions.

Let’s get something straight! The root cause for the great recession and the mortgage catastrophe was the Democrats (Jimmy Carters’) Community Reinvestment Act. I call it their ‘Mortgage For Everyone” program. They pressured’ i.e. threatened banks and lending institutions, if they didn’t give loans to to people who otherwise wouldn’t have qualified for a “legitimate” mortgage. Bill Clinton exacerbated the situation by expanding this program. When the housing bubble burst the poorly conceived program came crashing down on those people that never should have had a mortgage in the first place. I can remember Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on TV pushing the program and making not so subtle threats to lenders. So, don’t blame Bush. The Democrats and other liberals always come up with these “entitlement leaning” programs but don’t take responsibility for them when they go haywire and crash.